A very busy place

I decided to take advantage of the massive inflow of people into Wembley stadium during one of the days of the London 2012 Olympic Games. They had come to see a football match and so I thought I would try to capture all the vibrancy and colour as best as I could. I also remembered what I had found in the previous post regarding the relationship between focal length and ease of composition. This meant I could easily get the shot described below quickly lined up well.

   My main objective of course was to try to convey how busy the walkway leading up to the stadium was. I decided to use a deliberately slow shutter speed to induce motion blur on the people walking up. There was an interesting discovery I found as I took a few shots with a slow shutter speed. This was that the people closest to the camera blurred visibly a lot more than those further up the walkway and so further from the camera. This had the pleasing effect, for me at least, of leading the eye up towards the stadium.

   That lead me to my next point, which was that I thought I managed to convey a sense of place as well. This was because as the eye 'travelled' upwards from the blurred people to the not so blurred people the last thing it settled on was the extremely distinctive arch of Wembley stadium at the top of the frame.

1. The walk to Wembley stadium

   As far as the technicalities of the photo went I used a stack of a neutral density filter along with a circular polariser to get a slower shutter speed. I also used the maximum aperture value of f22, the lowest ISO value possible of 100 and a wait for cloudy weather (rather than sunny) all just to achieve a shutter speed of 1.6 seconds. However I felt this shutter speed was good at blurring the people sufficiently to create a sense of busyness without blurring them so much as to make them indiscernible. I knew there would be diffraction coming into the photo by using such a small aperture as f22 but I felt it was a necessary compromise to reach the slow shutter speed.